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Tom’s Guide
Tom’s Guide
Technology
Philip Michaels

SOS appearing on your iPhone? Here's what that means and how to change it

Apple
SOS Emergency on an iPhone.

Editors' Note: Verizon appears to be suffering an outage in the U.S. on January 14, 2026, which may explain the appearance of the SOS alert on your iPhone. See our Verizon outage live blog for more details.

If the words SOS are showing up in the status bar of your iPhone, that means you don't have any cellular connectivity. And that can be pretty frustrating if you know you're somewhere you should be getting a signal.

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